A Songwriter and Flexible Time

The Lucky Man and Three years in the Cryotank

10/17/2022 Everything, Everywhere, but never Anywhere. (with links to purchase)

On a blisteringly hot day in June, 2019, I got on a plane in San Jose, California and went home to Tennessee after recording 23 songs over 3 1/2 days with Brian Brinkerhoff of NeedtoKnow Records in Capitola, California.

Concurrently, in Brixton, England, my friend John Dower, filmmaker, director, expert at motion capture, was gathering up footage from having followed me, along with his daughter, Eden, during my longest UK tour in 2018, and a few shows in 2019, all with the intention of making the short film that would become, “I Don’t Do This For Love, I Do This For Love- Nathan Bell on Tour.”

Pop’s publisher was finally going to put all of the poems (from multiple releases) of his master work together into the collected Dead Man Poems.

Marvin Bell- Incarnate, The Collected Dead Man Poems

Later that year, I would return from a UK/Euro tour and fall ill with what I thought was a cold virus that included a particularly awful case of bronchitis. I spent three nights sleeping sitting up while I tried to find enough air to breathe. My crush was out of town and I was alone in the house, so I made it through the nights by watching movies that I’d watched a thousand times and using everything I knew from being a runner and a singer to just keep breathing.

Those three days were three of the worst days.

Little did I know.

The Lucky Man’s luck was about to be tested.

Fast forward to my family out to dinner at a pizza place in Chattanooga in March, 2020. Everybody was nervous and every surface was being sprayed with disinfectant.

That was the last time we ate inside any restaurant for 18 months.

NeedtoKnow Records had hurried out the EP, “The Right Reverend Crow Sings New American Folk and Blues” to support my 2019 tour. The album is 80% guitar/vocals/harmonic, recorded live. The fully cooked band tracks, vocals and acoustic guitar recorded live with drummer Alvino Bennett, guitars, bass and other things with strings provided by Frank Swart, including guest vocals by Patty Griffin, Aubrey Sellers, and Regina McCrary were stuck in limbo, waiting to see if the world would start turning again.

The Right Reverend Crow Sings New American Folk and Blues

Red, White and American Blues (it couldn't happen here)

As 2020 got going, the movie also stalled, due to the difficulties of working through the pandemic. John was putting in a yeoman’s effort but nothing was simple.

There was also the thought that with all the festivals trying to figure out what happened next, maybe the movie should just be held until things returned to normal.

Eventually the movie was released and you can watch it at at this link.

It’s pretty good, I think.

You can see for yourself, here.

I Don’t Do This For Love, I Do This For Love - Nathan Bell on Tour

Of course, nothing ever returned to normal.

My crush and I watched a thousand movies and TV shows.

We watched some movies multiple times, like the the obscure masterpiece, Powwow Highway.

In Powwow Highway, the hero. Philbert Bono, of Lame Deer, Montana, sets off on a vision quest. It is a touching and damn funny vision quest.

In one scene he uses the CB radio and finds himself talking to the great White Cloud (no heart of fear), who guides him in the right direction. White Cloud, of course, is long dead.

After the pandemic, after he had been dead and gone at least a year, I would try to talk to Pops (nobody knows better than I that this isn’t possible) by replacing the narrator’s voice with his. But the voice was always fading out and partially obscured by static. It always felt like I had White Cloud on the CB, but not clearly enough to understand.

I still don’t know where I’m supposed to go or what to do. I have no vision quest.

I have my medicine, though, and my tokens.

My tokens are straps from John Jarmuskiewicz of Gecko Leatherworks.

You can see all of the straps he has made me, my tokens, in order of when they were made, left to right.

I still choose the first strap he made me, the Family Man strap, the majority of the time. It’s the perfect reminder, it’s the perfect token and medicine.

So I had John make me two straps that reflected my mind set at the end of the Pandemic: one that represented my atheist tent preacher creation, The Right Reverend Crow, and a strap with the philosophy I borrowed from bike racing and distance riding, HTFU, which stands for Harden The Fuck Up.

I was sure that after everything that happened, the loss, the delays, I would do best if I just HTFU.

The Rev has been doing his job. The HTFU has been an utter failure.

The Rev is 100% against any religious organization, including any that he would form. The Rev is 100% for anybody who carries love into the world under any name.

The Rev defines love pretty broadly.

You can’t ask a woman to cover her entire body and face, or walk ten steps behind, and call it love.

You can’t refuse to teach young people the real deal with sex (it’s pretty great if you actually learn how to make it pretty great, and the pitfalls of not paying attention to cause and effect are significantly worse for women than men), expect them to not have sex, and then punish them for having sex, and call that love.

You can’t tell a woman she doesn’t control her life, her body, her emotions and call it love.

You can’t treat somebody with less money as your inferior and call it love.

You can’t own three yachts while people starve and call it love.

You can’t spend your life on social media insulting people and call it love.

You can’t force anybody to believe what you believe and call it love.

You can’t tell people who they can love and who they can marry and call that love.

There’s a long list of what isn’t love and it goes on and on and on.

You can’t even steal a parking spot, or cut the line, and call it love.

You get the point.

The Rev thinks small insults and big insults are all insults and should be treated as equally insulting.

The Rev is ordained. So if your wedding doesn’t line up with your family’s idea of a wedding…the rev will officiate.

The Rev spent the pandemic getting ready. He’s even thinking of setting up a tent next to some East Tennessee Highway. Free to all, free thought for all, really good music.

I’ve done a terrible job of “Hardening The Fuck Up.” If anything, the pandemic froze my career while weakening my resolve.

I’ve started counting the years and doing the math. If everything starts over, then how much of what I’ve earned in terms of reputation has to be re-earned?

At 62, knowing that it took five years (before the pandemic) just to build a reliable touring presence in the UK and Europe, I know I will be 67-68 when I regain that footing.

Time, remember, is flexible. When I was 55, five years felt like nothing. I didn’t think about the future, but if somebody had told me that I’d be playing the shows I was playing, to the audiences I was playing for, in the venues that were presenting me, in just five years, that would have felt like not so long.

Now, when every bump in the road feels like a small mountain, five years of hard work, while just hard work, has the potential to regularly test my HTFU philosophy.

On another note, The Vinyl edition of Red, White, and American Blues was stuck for almost a year in line behind Adele and all the big acts that rediscovered LPs.

But you can find it at the link below.

Red, White and American Blues Special Blue Vinyl Edition

The truth is that the pandemic caused time to shift and things that took almost no time at all started to stretch out.

Picture of a man in and out of his own time.

Time being flexible, the losses take forever, the little victories are gone in seconds.

I’m not smart enough to do the hard math that tells my why.

But I can do the simple math and when you add everything up, it looks like I’m still ahead.

The lucky man was tested.

The lucky man is still lucky.

He has just enough time.

Love somebody,

Nathan

Watch!

To Each of Us (a shadow) Video by Erica Scoggins

After all of this, all the plague PTSD, the deaths, the lost work, the fascists.

After all of it, I’m still lucky.

Love somebody,

Nathan